Unofficial news and tips about Google

May 3, 2013

Finding HTC One Using Google and Bing

When HTC named its latest flagship phone HTC One, I wasn't sure if it was a great idea. It's hard to find information about HTC One when there are so many pages about HTC One X, HTC One S, HTC One V and a few other phones with similar names.

Almost 3 months after HTC announced its phone, I tried 3 basic queries using Google and Bing: [htc one], [htc one review] and [htc one price]. I've switched to the US English interface and made sure that the results aren't influenced by personalization. All the screenshots show the first Bing results on the left side and the first Google results on the right side. For some of the screenshots, I scrolled down past the ads.

The results for [htc one]:

Bing's top organic result is the HTC One X homepage and the HTC One homepage is not even in the top 50 results. All Google results from the first page are about HTC One and the first result is the right one.

The results for [htc one review]:

The top 3 Bing results are HTC One X reviews, while all Google results from the first page are about HTC One.

The results for [htc one price]:

The first Bing result is about HTC One V and the third one is about One X, One S and One V. Google's results are relevant.

It's not clear if Google does a better job because it favours recent results or because it realizes that HTC One is a different entity. When searching for [htc one], the first Google result about One X is at #38.